Influenza Essay Topics & Paper Examples

Emerging infectious diseases are diseases that are new or changing, and are increasing, or have the potential to increase in incidence in the near future. (Pearson, Microbiology) Some important contributing factors to the development of EIDs are evolutionary changes in existing organisms, the movement of previously identified diseases to new geographic locations and populations by modern transportation, and increased human exposure to previously undocumented, uncommon infectious agents in areas of ecological growth or change. This includes previously uninhabited areas that may be undergoing deforestation or construction. EIDs also emerge as a result of resistance, and in recent years, an unusually high incidence of EIDs has drawn the attention of the global population in reaction to unsatisfactory health care facilities and…

Throughout history, there have been significant pandemics that have left a great impact on humankind. The first influenza pandemic to occur took place in 1918-1919. This pandemic was later classified as the Spanish influenza A H1N1. Successive outbreaks of influenza had occurred almost simultaneously throughout North America, Europe and Africa with not much being know about the virulence of the virus. It has been estimated that this pandemic caused around fifty million deaths in only twelve months. Half of the deaths that occurred were among those twenty to forty years of age. To this date there is still much controversy over where the virus originated, with suggestions being either from China or US military camps in the mid-west. Several years…

The bubonic plague, also called the Black Death, was considered the largest demographic disaster in the history of Europe. It arrived in Italy in late 1347 through its clockwise movement across the continent fizzling out in the Russian remote areas in 1353 (Routt). It had killed about eight million people (Routt). Before the bubonic plague, Europe was already intensifying food production because of the expansion of its population from approximately 25 million in the year 700 A. D. to approximately 75 million in 1250 (Dudgeon). The Black Death is known as yersinia pestis, a bacterium that caused the bubonic plague (Dudgeon). Bubonic plague started with the bite of infected fleas which inhabited the rats and then resulted to a blackish…

For most of the people of the world, the year 1918 was one of great challenge and hardship; for much of Europe, the implements of war and the men and boys who wielded them cut a swatch of destruction and death across an entire continent. Among these weapons was one of a relatively new nature- the chemical weapon. With chemical weapons came the horrific ability to kill thousands, if not millions, of people in one fell swoop. In the midst of such readily available death, millions of people across the United States and other parts of the world began to succumb to illnesses that were originally attributed, variably, to the work of German spies who infiltrated the food and water…